Introduction

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) involves performing delicate operations on anatomical structures through small incisions or natural orifices along tortuous paths inside the human body. Thus, such operations give rise to constraints in accessing and operation and further technical challenges. These demand the development trends to be diverted from straight and rigid operational arms to flexible and continuum manipulators, which support broad applications with minimal trauma and facilitate the demanding clinical procedures with miniaturized instrumentation and highly curvilinear access capabilities. However, the lack of sufficient force and shape sensing/estimation techniques poses great challenges to precise and reliable motion/force control of continuum manipulators, resulting in risks for patients. Developing force and shape sensing, estimation, and display (e.g., haptic/tactile feedback interfaces) techniques is crucial for safe clinical procedures. New results and breakthroughs towards these challenges can encourage the advances in closely associated techniques of closed-loop control, path planning, surgeon–robot interaction, and safety concerns in MIS. This workshop will bring both leading engineering and clinical experts to discuss the associated clinical needs, engineering challenges, and recent progress in the field. 

Interested Topics

The scope of this workshop covers (1) Engineering Development: technical requirements and recent engineering progress in the field of force and shape perception (modelling, sensing, and display); (2) Clinical Applications: clinical insights on the need/use of force and shape perception technologies. Topics of interest include:

(1)   Engineering Development

·     Haptic force/tactile force/shape/posture sensing for distal or proximal parts of surgical instruments and robots

·    Sensing systems, e.g., flexible/stretchable sensors, optical fibre-based force and shape sensing

·    Imaging-/model-/Learning-based force or shape estimation

·    Interfaces and control approaches for haptic/tactile force feedback

·    Control for medical/surgical robots based on force or shape sensing

(2)   Clinical Applications

·    Clinical needs and insights for the development of medical devices with force and shape perception in various surgical procedures such as endoscopic surgery, endobronchial/endovascular interventions, neurosurgery, otolaryngology, urology and gynecology, and other emerging clinical applications.

·    Clinical experience of existing technologies (e.g., shape sensing technologies employed in ScopeGuide and Intuitive Surgical’s ION surgical platforms).